The Memorial Day weekend flood was so overwhelmingly calamitous in its size and scope that The Woods riverside multi-family development definitively did not cause damage in the nearby Blanco Gardens neighborhood, a hydrologist with three decades of experience in flood analysis has concluded.

Even before the wall of water reached San Marcos, the Blanco River was flowing at 180,000 cubic feet per second — the average volume and velocity of the Mississippi River at St. Louis, Halff Associates vice president Michael Moya told the San Marcos City Council on Tuesday.

Three council members were intensely skeptical about Moya’s failure to find correlation or causation between the mammoth new apartment complex and its single-family neighbors. A spirited discussion flowed at the council dais for more than an hour.